


Zone V

by BlackberryAvar



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Carrie as Astrid Hofferson, F-15, F-15D, Fighter Pilots, Henry Hyse as Hiccup Haddock, Jets, Useless reptile, War Thunder - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26109106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackberryAvar/pseuds/BlackberryAvar
Summary: A fighter pilot and his WSO meet an unknown object in the skies over Sweden.One-shot, might make this a two-shot if I'm interested.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	Zone V

Henry Hyse was a military kid, and military kids aren’t used to surprises. It was all the more unexpected, then, when he looked left from the cockpit of his F-15D and saw a black dot off his nose as he cruised at 0.4 mach near 20,000 feet, the jet on the edge of stalling at these high-altitudes. He squinted, and the dot formed into something that looked sharp, snub-nosed, more like a fighter than a civilian aircraft, flying comfortably above the clouds far below in the crisp, clean Swedish air. And was it flapping?

This in and of itself was a surprise.

“Contact 327,” he said into his intercom system. “No radar signature. Check it.”

A moment later the response came back from Carrie, his WSO. “Nothing, not a blip.”

“Must be a bird,” said Hyse. Strange, that an object big enough to attract his attention wouldn’t show up on the AN/APG-70 – an old radar, but good enough to detect anything within visual range. His interest was piqued.

He nudged the stick left and the old Eagle rolled sluggishly, thousand-fold maintained elevons stiff in the cold. A slight application of rudder and back pressure brought him into a slow turn, and the indicated airspeed nearer and nearer the red. He pushed up the throttle a tick with a brown-gloved hand, noted the second-long delay before the RPM gauges stirred minutely, and nothing more.

His plane reminded him of a reptile in the winter, blinking sleepily when the sun came out.

“Hold it together, you hangar queen,” he muttered.

His eyes flicked to the black flier as if to pin it down – now coming across the plane’s nose, growing larger as he grew closer to it. He kept looking at it, expecting the color to resolve as he drew nearer – to blue, green, or another tint. The bird remained quite dark , flapping every fifteen seconds or so, almost lazily. It seemed in no hurry to get out of the way.

“I didn’t know vultures flew all the way up here,” he said.

“Or that they grew so big,” said the WSO.

Hyse straightened out the turn so he would pass on the right side of the bird if it stayed his course, then pulled back the throttle to reduce his closing speed and give him more time to look at it – or more time to intimidate the occupants if it turned out to be a stealth orthinopter or something.

A bird it was not, or a human craft either. Once he was close enough to see it, to make out its lines, his free hand dropped to the control panel, and his grip on the stick weakened. The result was a predictable but still sudden down pitch because of the release of back pressure, and a thump from the backseat as Carrie’s helmet connected with her headrest.

“Hyse!”

“Sorry,” he said. His lips were dry and they hadn’t been before. He would only find out later that that was because he’d tripped on the AC when his hand fell to the control panel. “You brought the camera, right?”

“Yes.”

“Get it.”

Shuffling. He didn’t know where they stored the camera; just an old Nikon someone had recovered from base recycling and offered up as a tool to take up on practice flights like this one.

“Got it.”

“Hold it up to the canopy and get ready to take a picture when I pass by,” said Hyse. Then he keyed a different intercom, the one he should’ve used the moment he saw that contact. It was the radio. “Baseplate, this is Fury 1-1 Actual; bogey bullseye 25 for 90 FL 200, doesn’t show up on radar. Am attempting viz ID, over.”

He’d called in a threat 25 degrees from the airbase’s bearing, and ninety miles away. Given those coordinates, the more powerful phased-array radar on the ground should be able to pick up something even if the aged detection system onboard his bird couldn’t.

“Uh, copy that Fury 1-1 Actual, bogey does not show up on radar, confirm?” The ATC’s voice always came through the airwaves as human but not human; crackling with the energy of the ether.

“Carrie, is it on the APG yet?”

“No.”

“Bogey does not show up on radar, over ,” said Hyse. His eyes were still on it, dead-center. They’d call him crazy if he radioed in what it was.

“Relay visual signature, over. ” said the ATC. And there was the request. He couldn’t tell the truth, so he hedged.

“Looks like a big bird, could be a stealth orthinopter, over ,” he said. It wasn’t, but there was the sanitized version of it.

“Noted,” said the ATC. “Proceed with caution, over.”

Hyse clicked off. The dragon – and that was what it was – was still flying calmly in front of them, paying little heed to him and his hulking brute of a fighter. It was sleek, perfect for the air; with long, black wings and a head like a broad-tipped arrow, with a set of secondary fins just behind its wings and another on its tail. It was smaller than the F-15, or any jet plane – small enough to carry a man on its back, but undeniably powerful.

“Do you see it yet?” he asked.

“No – wait – holy -”

“Get a picture!”

With unsteady hands she raised the Nikon and pressed the trigger. There was the click of a shutter, one, two, three, and then she was done, staring at the beast in awe. It spun in midair when they came alongside, then nosed down and increased speed, as if beckoning for them to follow.

“This is Fury 1-1 Actual to Baseplate , req uesting altitude deviation from FLP, over.”

“Baseplate to Fury 1-1 Actual, permission granted.”

Hyse cut the throttle to the minimum safe level for this altitude and this speed, watched the RPM gauges spool down to a crawl, then pitched down after the diving dragon and watched them pick up again, as the increasing speed forced air into the intakes and drove the turbine blades. Then the indicated airspeed passed four hundred knots, and he cut the engines to idle, as the altitude gauge ticked down and the climb rate indicator went so far into the negative the real number was off the dial.

Four-fifty. Five hundred knots. He nudged the stick to bring him closer to that black dragon, who was still diving, still accelerating, as the mach number on the heads-up display passed 0.75 and made tracks for 0.8, as he went past fourteen thousand feet, thirteen, and little rivulets of vapor formed on the trailing edges of the wings.

He was going to go supersonic.

And that crazy dragon next to him was going to go supersonic with him.

0.89, .90, .91, .92 - .98, .99. An instant passed, and in that instant his plane burned through another thousand feet of altitude, picking up that last minute amount of speed necessary to reach the sound barrier.

Mach 1.

His eyes flicked to the height gauge, and froze. Five thousand feet, the tens blurring into hundreds, the hundreds feeding into thousands faster than he could blink. He pulled up on the stick, clenched his legs to keep the blood from flowing into them and felt his puny efforts fail, as his vision turned black and narrowed into a tunnel, a tunnel where the only light was the little indicator on the HUD that said 12 Gs.

If he had pulled any harder he would’ve ripped the wings right off and then where would they have been – in heaven maybe. He doubted it. His vision cleared slowly; his ears rung as if filled by the clatter of church bells. He looked left of his nose and back, half-expecting there to be a dragon-shaped hole in the terrain, but lo – there beneath his elevator was the dragon, its wings tucked back so it looked more like a bullet than a bird.

It looked right into his eyes with its own, and he could’ve sworn it winked at him. Then, with a flick of its wings, it rolled and disappeared behind his exhausts. He pushed up the throttle and pumped the rudder pedals, clearing his baffles to see where it had gone, but it had disappeared, leaving him alone in his old fighter.

Well, not quite alone.

“HYSE! Could you have warned me before you gave me a heart attack!”


End file.
